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The Secret Ingredients to a Successful Website

For most businesses these days, their website is their core sales funnel. We live in a digital world, and consumers are privy to carrying out much of their day-to-day transactions online.

As such, it is vital that you nail your website presence. Digital consumers have come to expect a certain experience when researching brands online, and if your website fails to dish up the goods, customers will bounce in a heartbeat.

To help ensure your website is structured to elicit the best results possible for your ROI, here are our five most important tips to tuck away.

1. Accessibility to all customers.Earlier this year, we mentioned the importance of tailoring your website to fit mobile devices. Your business needs to be accessible to everyone, no matter what device they’re operating from. With the ongoing push for mobile-first website design, we recommend checking whether your site meets the requirements and caters to the variety of users potentially making up your target market.

2. Clean design.Overcrowding your website with images, choosing poor colour contrasts, employing illegible fonts – these all work to send users quickly scurrying from your site. First impressions are paramount in website design, particularly given how much choice digital users have. If something doesn’t quite suit their tastes, they won’t deliberate whether to hang around – they’ll simply move on to the next available option.

3. Scannable content.Statistics show that readers skim through online content far more than they do with hard-copy information. As mentioned in the previous point, their online choices are vast and their time is precious; they want to be able to pass judgment on a business within a few seconds. Breaking up your text into bite-sized sections is ideal: use bullet points and headings to create strong, easy-to-digest chunks of information.

4. Logical layout.You need to put yourself in your customer’s shoes and consider how they will approach your site. Be wary of making them dig around for information, and take the time to ask yourself the following questions: What information is most important? What questions do they immediately want answered? What unique selling points will convince them to hang around your site? As a general rule of thumb, segment your information in an up-to-down hierarchy according to its degree of importance.

5. Easy navigation.Last but not least, your users should enjoy their experience when visiting your website and feel encouraged to click onto your other pages. As such, you want to make sure they clearly know how to get from A to B. Simple HTML or JacaScript menus are highly recommended: they make the user’s journey easy and care-free, not to mention they appear consistent on all browsers and platforms. Make sure you limit your menu items and include categorised drop-down menus if need be. Furthermore, scatter call-to-actions around each page to help nudge users in the right direction.

By following the above guidelines, you can pave your way to a successful website that effectively turns visitors into loyal customers.